Daveportivo's Cultural Evaluation Facility

When that big crunching riff from Devil's Haircut, Beck's best single, kicks in you know business is about to pick up, then Beck unleashes his most poignant lyrics to date "Something's wrong because my mind is fading / Everywhere I look there's a dead end waiting". From then on in Odelay is beast unto itself, it shows Beck the albatross floating around effortlessly, the only real constants other than the sheer suprising bursts of the samples are Beck's voice, this is Beck in full montone rap/croon his only variation is his manic scream. High 5 is a perfect example Beck raps, screams, starts a chant while the music switches from racous squark to Schubert Unfinished Syphomy 9 he even fades earlier track Novocaine into the mix. Ultimately however rather than talk about he excentricities, the crafty samples and the fascinating arrangements, the best compliment you can play to Odelay is that it's brilliant. It spawned five singles, a mamoth number by Alternative standards and every track on the album is exciting, thrilling and intriguing and almost all are classics. Beck's great talent is that while his music is often unexpected, you can rarely predict where a song will end up after the first minute it could metamorphaize in any which dirrection, the music is neither uncomfortable or inaccessible it's superbly crafted. A track that weeves and shape shifts like Hotwax is equally gorgeous as a big folk ballad like Jack-Ass. The album is stacked to rafters with great tunes, soulful ballads, amazing cool crunching riffs and Beck's absolute best quasi-rapping, seriously stick on Minus it's an absolute riot, Beck's flow is sharp, the guitars are perfect and the beat is a sensation. I haven't even mention New Pollution yet, there's simply too much to talk about when it comes to Odelay it has such depth, and unquestionable and unexepected triumph.

Rock 'n' Roll Star tells you everything you need to know about this album. It's fast, it's urgent, it's immediate, this is a bunch of lads who are not waiting around their sick of their lives, their sick of the mundane repetitive nature of everyday life they want to escape, they want to be free, they want their dreams to come true, they want to be rock stars. Definitely Maybe is all about aspirations and escapism, being free on stage and escaping the city for the country and the sunshine. "I'd like to be somebody else / And not know where I be / I'd like build myself a house / Out across the sea" its not big, it's not clever, it's rarely ever subtly but it is incredibly affecting and uplifting. It's the only Oasis album you'll ever need and pretty much the only one worth owning. It contains all their best singles Supersonic, Ciggarettes & Alcohol and of course Liver Forever. The latter being among the most important singles of modern times and seems to endlessly win rock polls for best song, it's not hard to see why the lyrics cut straight to heart of the human condition "I said maybe, I don't want to know how your garden grows cause I just want to fly...Maybe I just fly / Wanna Live I Don't wanna die...You and I were gonna live forever", hits the spot everytime. While musically it probably shouldn't be anywhere near the top ten, it apes the Beatles and the Stone Roses, it's rarely creative, but it is urgent, important and culturally powerful. Adverts still say "the best guitar album since Definitely Maybe" it's such a significaint cultural landmark. It's totally lost on American's who only see a bunch of thuggish retro lad rockers but for us over in the UK Oasis will always be inspirational heroes, albeit for just one album. Certainly the duff tracks aren't hard to spot but fewer records could be more important in shaping a nation culturally (arguably for the worse) than Definitely Maybe.

When WDPK 83.7 FM deejay declares his station "The Sound Tommorrow The Music Of Today" over and ice cold beat the words could not have been more apt. Daft Punk were about to take the biggest sound of the day, big beat, and mix it with the French underground dance scene to create a world wide dance revolution. Dance music ruled the waves in the late ninities as rock and pop were frankly pathetic, if it weren't for Daft Punk I'm not sure anyone would have made it to 2001. So huge huge thumping bass was in, looping scrathes and thudding percussion was coming back and dance would one again be about creating great sweeping movements, through the sheer force of repititions and subtly variation Daft Punk were to take control and own the dance floor. Obviously this album isn't as affective through the head phones as it is live, at a club or at a party but it's still mightly awesome and the beats are slick as fuck. Daft Punk however aren't just the sound of today, the sound of tommorrow, there also the sound of the eighties funk and pop. While it would come out more predominantly on Discovery, Homework was the dance super beast, it rose dance beyond repetitive sloganeering and proved that by creating a flowing evolving epic peice dance could be more than a cobbled together collection of singles, or goofy catchpharse and hooks, it was the sound of the superclub, with top quality mixing and beat development. Every track on this album would be mercilessly mixed and remixed, forming bridges, samples and inspiration for the club djs and dance acts of the next ten years. When it comes to genuine dance monsters records don't come bigger than Homework spawning Around The World, Da Funk, Teachers, Revolution 909, Daftendirekt, Burnin' and Alive. Undoubtably the least complete album in the top ten but you'd be hard pressed to find one more important than Homework.

I've always liked to say when describing Blur and in particular this album, that Blur did a Radiohead, before doing a Radiohead was cool. 13 was that departure, while comparing it to Kid A is a little on the silly side, the departure between OK Computer the international jugganaught and the icey unapproachably brilliant Kid A isn't an exact parrarell to Blur's departure from the pop heights to The Great Escape to the gorgeously artisitc 13 the reaction was the same. 13 was still in many was a conventional album, it had pop singles, beautiful melodies and sublime hooks, yet it was uncomfortable, broody, ominous haunting and abbrasive, this was not Country House. When 13 was released it was jumped upon it seemed like commercial suicide, the people who sent This Charming Man and Country House to the top spot weren't going to fall for Bugman and 1992. But honestly who cares, because Blur managed to find their creative high watermark and 13 certainly was the first real suggestion of the creative genius that was Damon Albarn (and to an extent Graham Coxon).

The songs are of such high quality; 1992 is a haunting ballad which gets steadily more ominous leading to it's deliciously creative conclusion. It's immediately followed by the mad punch of squelchy rocker B.L.U.R.E.M.I that kicks like an absolute mule and can be seen as a clear forerunner for the Crazy Beat and Music Is My Radar experimentation. The Seven minute Battle is beautiful lead by a haunting xylophone arrangement which is probably Coxon's guitar being morphed unrecognizably, while Damon sychotically drones on. Blur certainly give everything ago Trailer Park is a noble effort at a Trip-hop-rock track and elsewhere Coxon's guitar is mutilated to create these often scary intimidating soundscapes. Huge credit has to go to William Orbit on product who brings all this experimentation together in a cohesive work that sounds goregous. If this all sounds a bit scary for you fear not the obvious singles are here in the form of the brilliant Graham sung Coffee & TV, the silly-paro-balladlry of Tender, the lairy rock stomper Swamp Song and downbeat ballad No Distance Left To Run. All in all Blur showed us that they were more creative than their Brit Pop peers, that their true rivals would be Radiohead and that more than anything they were ready for the next decade and they were ready to change.

So how big is Deserter's Songs? The answer: It's utterly ginormous, it's beyond comprehension, it's a big as the grand canyon and as long as an endless highway and as wide as the Russia Steppe. This is a gorgeous and graceful album as widescreen as they come. The music soars epically high and beyond your headphones or your speakers, the arrangements are so grandious, yet their not prententious or over the top, they are in perfect harmony. It's all rooted around Jonathan Donahue's storytelling and his fragile croon, he tells glorious love stories, so intimate and so detialed, even if they are rooted around wide screen imagery of rail lines and high ways. The album starts sublimely with the epic Holes and the wonderfully affecting Tonite It Shows. The album then gets fully epic with the sweeping strings and the choiral arrangements Endlessly a song that was made for the big screen, it feels like a motion picture come to life, the arrangement is bigger than life, it's full of big board strokes, but equally balenced by subtly little touches of percussion here and there, amazingly at one point you feel as though your in the middle of a disney film the next you feel like you've been thrown into an underwater odssesy or 2001. You can hear the sound of The Band on this album and two of the members even help out on the glorious funk rock of Hudson Lines of course this song also includes the festival slayer Goddess On A Hiway. I don't want to go on an on about this album as it has so much scope and so much depth, it's better to simply say Deserter's Songs is as beautiful an album as has ever been created.